Saturday, July 26, 2003

Message in his bottles is golden

By JOEL ZLOTNIK

NEWPORT BEACH – The city's only vintner has struck gold with his grapes.

Nestled on 3 1/2 acres between the Newport Beach Golf Course and the Back Bay is Richard Moriarty's Newport Beach Vineyards and Winery.

Moriarty, the great-grandson of Orange County pioneer Charles Segerstrom, took home a gold medal in the fair's 2003 Homewine Competition with his 2001 Back Bay Cuvée Meritage.

The award-winning red was made from a mix of Santa Ynez grapes he picked himself and those from the 700 vines he planted on his land four years ago.

The 55-year-old vintner actually got his start a few years before he could legally drink the wine himself. While a high school student living in Santa Ana, he picked a few pomegranates off a neighborhood tree, juiced them and poured the juice into an old wine bottle. He corked it, and it wasn't long before the liquid fermented into a sparkling pomegranate wine, vintage 1966. "It really wasn't that bad," Moriarty recalled.

But it's a long way from the 110 cases of his award-winning Back Bay Cuvée he plans to bottle and sell locally.

Newport Beach, he says, is the perfect environment for his endeavor, and the "vines grow like weeds." His original plan was to just grow the grapes and sell them to other vintners. After neighbors complained they didn't want trucks coming and going from the rural residential neighborhood, he decided to make the wine himself.

That's the tough part, he said. The grapes are picked and taken into his garage, where they are crushed, juiced, mixed, fermented, aged and bottled.

"It's a lot more work than I thought it would be," he said. And although so far the business has been "good for tax purposes," Moriarty swirls and stares at a glass of the Meritage, takes a sip and truly enjoys the fruits of his labor.

To see where Moriarty's wine is available go to www.nbwine.com